Snap

“It Was Cataclysmic”: Can Snapchat Survive Its Redesign?

Evan Spiegel’s ill-received overhaul has publishers worried about their future with Snap. “I would like to be optimistic,” says one media partner. But “it might be too little, too late. They’ve done quite a lot to alienate readers and users.”

In mid-April, with Kylie Jenner in revolt and its stock sliding downward, Snap quietly hosted a number of publishers in New York and Los Angeles at day-long summits at its headquarters in both cities. The meetings, which the company says had been planned months in advance, were intended to clear the air and get feedback from publishers following a February redesign that had sequestered Snap’s media partners in their own corner of the app, away from friends’ photo and video messages. Evan Spiegel, Snap’s precocious 27-year-old C.E.O., had described this partition in glowing terms: “One of the complaints we’ve heard about social media is that photos and videos from your friends are mixed in with content from publishers and creators and influencers,” he explained at the time. “Your friends aren’t content—they’re relationships. That’s why today we’re separating the ‘social’ from the ‘media.’”

But Snapchat’s millennial users weren’t thrilled with the update—which was deemed cluttered and confusing—nor were its publisher partners. “There was a lot of venting, a lot of aired grievances,” one publisher employee who works on the Discover channel told me, describing the New York summit. “It does seem clear that they’re interested in listening. But I don’t think the people working on Discover have the answers for most of our concerns.”

Those concerns have only deepened over the past few months as Snap, once seen as a Facebook successor for millennials and Generation Z, has lost its edge to Instagram, another Mark Zuckerberg property, which unapologetically copied Snapchat’s features and cut its market value in half. When Snapchat first exploded into the mainstream, in 2012 and 2013, its premise of disappearing photo and video messages, and a smaller, more intimate social network seemed like a radical corrective to the Facebook panopticon. And the company also seemed interested in finding useful, revenue-generating partnerships with content partners. In 2015, Snap launched Discover, establishing partnerships with media companies like CNN, Cosmopolitan, the Daily Mail, and Vice, serving up short-form, ephemeral content alongside premium advertisements. The health of those partnerships was vital to Spiegel’s vision for curated content, which is one of a handful of features setting Snapchat apart (the company also has its Snap Map feature, augmented-reality games called Snappables, world lenses, and Bitmoji—the latter of which Facebook announced this week it would be replicating with its Facebook Avatars). Publishers were also optimistic. Last year, Snap’s Discover platform generated around $100 million for its media partners.

Spiegel’s ill-received redesign, however, has caused publishers, many of them already beleaguered by vexing headwinds, to worry. The harshest critics of the redesign were Snapchat’s most loyal users, who complained that the new interface was disorganized, and that it had become more difficult to share posts with friends and to track incoming messages. Also, notably, the new redesign caused users to lose their highly valued “streaks,” which shows how many days in a row two users have sent snaps back and forth—a critical loss for an app reliant on interpersonal, one-to-one communication. More than a million people signed a Change.org petition imploring the company to restore the old version of the app, and Jenner decamped to Instagram. Employees at four different publishers told me that unique views, subscriber numbers, and time spent—both metrics of engagement for their Discover editions—were cut in half after the redesign. “It was cataclysmic, in terms of engagement,” one source told me. “We saw uniques drop by over 50 percent, but worse was we saw the new-subscriber numbers absolutely plummet. So not only were fewer people viewing the content, no one was signing up to get the page higher up in their feed.” Snap did not comment on the record for this story.

Snap scrambled to reassure publishers, inviting major partners to its headquarters to debrief, but it’s not clear if any of the issues have been resolved. “They asked us for feedback in surveys we took before the summit, and the theme at the event seemed to be: we hear you,” another publisher employee told me. “Listening to us is nice, but it’s not helping our unique-view numbers recover.”

On a more profound level, these tensions reflect deeper worries among media companies about the unstable state of their industry, and nagging fears that Snap may not be the safe port they had been promised. With print revenues on the decline, the promise of native advertising waning, and Facebook revealing itself to be an unreliable partner, several digital-media companies had committed resources to producing content on Snapchat. But as this year’s redesign made brutally clear, publishers that bet too heavily on the tech platform du jour are at risk of getting burned. When the Discover vertical was first launched, “Snap was extremely hands on and demanding” during the application process, one Discover producer told me. “When the redesign hit, we kept waiting for some sort of guidance. They gave nothing.”

Meanwhile, as the media business continued its convulsion, Snap was encountering its own birth pangs in the public market. Part of the problem surrounding Discover, several Snapchat content producers speculated, appeared to be related to recent layoffs at Snap, which wiped out many of their contacts with the company. At first, “They would come over and meet up with us every month or two to talk about what we could be doing better,” one source told me. “That all kind of seemed to end this year after those layoffs.”

Content producers from eight publishers I spoke to said that the redesign had made their metrics go haywire. “It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if the update wasn’t so terrible for our metrics,” said the Discover producer. Many were bracing for it, having worked with other platforms, like Facebook, where the algorithms that pick winners and losers are volatile. Furthermore, they said, Snapchat was never particularly helpful when it came to helping them optimize their content strategies. “Essentially, we’d just throw stuff on the wall to see what stuck, before the redesign,” another source complained. “Then the redesign hit, and that made it even more of a crapshoot.”

The annals of business history, and M.B.A. seminars, are filled with cautionary tales of companies that changed their model, alienated customers, and never recovered. Myspace, the most popular U.S. social network before Facebook, lost its way when it focused on music, and was later sold at a huge loss by News Corp. Which isn’t to say that successful companies never make mistakes: in 1985, the Coca-Cola Company faced a consumer revolt when it reformulated its flagship beverage, but immediately reversed course, causing sales to explode. In 2011, Netflix C.E.O. Reed Hastings admitted that he, too, had made a mistake when he hiked the price of its DVD and streaming-video services, causing the company’s stock to drop by nearly 50 percent. Instead, he decided to split the two businesses and rebrand. “We realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures,” he said, two weeks after the price hike went into effect. Seven years later, the stock is up about 1,500 percent.

Discover may represent a very small part of Snap’s value, but it does reflect many of the company’s ideals—its intention to be a safe space where media and social media, after all, are politely separated. And recovering from the blip may, too, suggest the sort of leader that its C.E.O. is becoming. Spiegel, for his part, isn’t entirely backing down. Shortly after he announced Snap’s redesign, in November of last year, he acknowledged that there would be growing pains for the company. “We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial long-term benefits to our business,” he explained. Still, he seems responsive to feedback. Snap recently gave partners the option to post branded content to Discover, for example. There’s also the promise that the much-loathed redesign can be improved; an update to the redesign puts users’ friends’ Stories back on the Discover page, and surfaces publisher content. Below a scroll of friends’ Stories and user subscriptions to different publisher content, Snapchat will show recommendations of content users might be interested in based on how they already like to consume it. The forthcoming redesign of the redesign, which is still being tested, will place Snapchat Stories from friends alongside posts from celebrities, brands, publishers, and influencers—an easy way to appease celebs who’ve begun to defect from the platform, perhaps in part because their posts are less visible.

Whether those changes are enough to stanch the bleeding remains to be seen. “I would like to be optimistic, and the fact is that this continues to be a pretty successful platform for us,” the source who works on a Discover channel told me. “My impression, though, is that [the new redesign] might be too little, too late. They’ve done quite a lot to alienate readers and users.”

Not everyone involved with Snap is as concerned about the changes, however. “We go through shifts with platforms all the time. Look at Facebook,” one publisher employee told me. “Part of the job is literally just adapting to these growing pains and the algorithms. Emerging social media is unpredictable; we’re still on Snapchat because it’s helping us reach an engaged younger audience.” And people close to the company remain optimistic that Discover is going to take off at some point—it’s just a matter of when. “I think Discover will probably go through a lot of iterations, and I’m pretty confident it will be really successful at some point,” one recently departed Snap executive told me, then paused. “I just don’t know how soon that would be.”